On Wed, 11 Jun 2003, C Bobroff wrote: > That's one of the problems with schemes like Eurofarsi mentioned earlier: > once you put the short vowels, you commit yourself to one dialect but if > you leave them out, you can maintain the universality of the Persian > language.
I was talking to the new chair of the Persian Academy's "Language and Computers" group the other day, and we were chatting about the previous efforts to latinize the Persian script. We tried to look at the Turkish language reform independent of its cultural and political aspects, but only linguistically. He had a notion that the word "Meem-Heh-Meem-Dal" had somehow become an ideograph in the Muslim countries, written the same way from Turkey to Indonesia, but pronounced in at least five or six completely different ways (Turks pronounce it as "Mehmet" for example). He was mentioning that the Turks did the script switch and the standardization of the pronounciation of the language at the same time. You can't do one without another. And it's the second one that is very hard. Very few notice that they should do that also, when they suggest a Latin orthography, so not a single one of them has ever come to any real achivement. Everybody just uses his or her own personal pronounciation. He also had a belief that if you want to look from the computing side, and not the cultural one, it is exactly the orthography involved that is keeping us behind (any maybe a script switch will help). We struggle over the orthography, so a real application never arises. No one dares to simplify the orthographic rules well enough to make them implementable, no one risks creating a complete dictionary with solid orthographic recommendations based on a previously finalized orthography, ... There are some good news involved, of course, like a group working in the Persian Academy to create a word list according to the official orthography the Academy published recently. And there's a sad side to story always: the official orthography is not of a good-enough quality, the team has a very limited budget, and they are not even using a special software to help them. I promised to help them, but you know how bad I am in keeping these kind of promises ;-) Any volunteer residing in Iran (and has real experience in Persian computing)? roozbeh _______________________________________________ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
